


below her word

by femmey



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-28 10:32:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19392310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/femmey/pseuds/femmey
Summary: the inquisitor has been a nevarran oddity for as long as the world has known her, but not the only one to roam skyhold's grounds. if her and cassandra's interactions were tangled before, the loom begins to unravel nearly smoothly following a reading sitting





	below her word

**The Inquisitor had grown more puzzling than ever, veiled in enigmas of indigo.**

It had not been a mellow few weeks since their arrival back in Skyhold – it never was. With the strain and heavy work, knuckles roughened by the whipping winds of these heights and their sheer isolation – steel beaten into shape from dawn until dusk, tongues sharp and keen from closely calculated discussions – it was but falling back into routine. Emissaries and their many-faced negotiations ebbed and flowed like the faraway currents which whipped at the jutting peaks of Adamant, and, among their crowded words and gilded glares, the Inquisitor stood and provided the service they'd all wound a damned way through the Frostbacks for: judgement. The Chantry stirred, snarled, drooled with gluttony after possible candidates from this very organization. Some feared how their roots spread beneath Thedas with the stubbornness of ivy. But the silk-tongued, secret-clad leader had laid their woes to temporary rest with a heavy hand under the guise of a lack of time. _There should be time_ , unhappy mouths had protested, their maw shut by whom they deemed a hard-headed savage in the very moment they'd uttered it. _A Divine is needed_. Nobody objected, only dodged. Acidic conversations had been rightfully carried out on this topic ever since Halamshiral, after all.

Truth be told, battle did brew on the horizon. When she wasn't neck-deep in worldly duties, the Herald took care of her clan's tangled affairs, urging back fervent youth who wished to join the incursion south in six months' time, to leave their elders. And when she wasn't weaving through _those_ letters, the air bit into what features she allowed the outer world to see when she was working shoulder to shoulder with the men, testing recruits' strength against her own in the ring, knelt with the surgeons and lent her knowledge and mercy to the wounded.

Of course, _of course_ it was at least surprising when merely four weeks following their return from the old Warden fort, the less mechanic half of her peeked outside.

While the sharp noise of steel sparking against flint hissed for a moment only, the Inquisitor watched with keen eyes as the Seeker tossed away the blunt training spear and slicked back her hair. The sun rarely seemed to take a break from its searing heat even here, and every fellow not sensible enough to wear any kind of head covering sported ugly burns on their noses and cheeks. Layers of clothing stuck to every muscle bunched up and coiled like a serpent. The elf blew a long, thin funnel of smoke during her pondering on this.

“Real spears next time,” she spoke, and although her tone had arched like a question, it had clearly been a statement.

The Seeker spared her a grin. “Already? _Now_ I can barely contain my excitement.”

“Save your breath, Pentaghast! You are still panting like a draft animal.”

“Speak of delicacy!”

“I take it you are an expert?”

Light laughter. The victor had been promised a pint of ale from the start, and Cassandra had earned hers well. In all fairness, although Sîrma had allowed her to win, she always hit like it was her last blow – damn Nevarran was not as slow to learn as others the elf had met in her wide travels. She would later confess this with a sly smile while leaning over the bar.

 _Sîrma._ It was still such a new sound to get accustomed to. The Herald's prized birth name was now the Seeker's to struggle to toss out of the lines in the dirt through dirty tricks none other had taught her.

Still, the blade remained her preferred weapon, not much unlike _Inquisitor_ was her preferred way of addressing this looming elf that was laughing copiously in the next seat over.

“And this,” she announced, quiet enough to have it be just between the two of them, loud enough to make it comically formal, “goes to javelin master Cassandra Allergien Filosofia... and so on, Pentagon!”

 _You are terrible_. “You have the order wrong,” the Seeker shook her head, though a smile caught the corner of her mouth, and she took a sip from her stein.

“I have been thinking, Pentaghast, of how long it has been since our last reading session.” Something pinched at her tone… No, all of it carried a hint of _something_ puzzling.

“And what do you propose?”

“That we have one before either of us snaps in half under this stress.” _Challenge_. It was challenge skillfully shaping her speech. “As soon as you would like it.”

“This evening?”

“This evening!”

*

The taut Inquisitor pulled her coat around her, although it was a fine temperature to anybody accustomed to the evening cold. _Accustomed_. Keyword, in the context of the steppe she still yearned for here and now, two years later, in these mountains widowed of any warm wind's caress.

She had laid a low table between two floor cushions. Now she patiently scrambled for some misplaced notes, as she had long put them away and stalled on revising them at all. At the same time, the elf waited for a knock at her door – and it came, firm and loud – and she yelled to cover the echo in her quarters.

Her nimble hands found the carefully kept leather-bound notebook in its specific hideout: a narrow compartment between the real and a pseudo-back to her library, covered by a wooden plank previously tightly nailed in place. There were many spots to hide anything when or if she wanted to, Sîrma had found. Some of her more meaningful belongings had been sewn inside her pillows, and it was only her who washed them, adamantly yet politely suggesting that the Lavellan-woven fabric was beyond southern comprehension. That had only taken one talk slid to the right listener. Yet she needed not hide things from the Seeker, whom she watched climb upstairs; meanwhile, her hands worked with the plank. Her eyes creased with welcome.

It seemed that Cassandra had had similar thoughts of some kind of celebration. Her shirt was filled with figs, a sight for sore eyes. She spilled the bruised fruit onto the table, chasing one with a groan when it rolled away. There came a joke about escaping the mortifying ordeal of being cut and grinded up and digested, slipping like a fresh spring leaf between fingers. There was also sitting down involved, with Sîrma tossing aside a handful of the figs – much to Cassandra's dismay – to make way for her glimmering discoveries. And the book in question, the glorious crime serial straight out of Orlais that chewed its readers inside out, it lay aside, patient. _This was all too familiar._

“I think I have deciphered this... paragraph the former baroness had scribbled in her journal, if you recall the chapter,” spoke Sîrma urgently, her excitement drawing Cassandra in over her disorderly notes. She'd jumped right in. No need for formalities now. “They were neumes as you had suspected, but without their origins–“

“Go ahead, read it!”

Both of their faces lit up like they were schoolgirls and not warriors nearing their forties. The Inquisitor could only comply with the Seeker's impatient request.

“It goes thus:

_What terrible ailment must it be_

_To know the one which lies within you,_

_To tear with the cowardice of dreams_

_And watch the blood drain from the vein._

_Observing on my dear man,_

_Reading synapses of his manners,_

_I had him go down to the creek_

_And in the creek he died within me._ ”

“...Oh, Maker. This is a murder confession, no? _The_ murder confession?”

“I believe it is. It does not explain her motive, though.”

“His wealth! And their child! Why she fled with the boy after their estate burned down.” Cassandra's brow furrowed with concern. "It only enforces the idea of her being a fractured mind. Wouldn’t you say?"

“Yes,” Sîrma agreed rather sullenly. “Which is exactly why I do not think she is the murderer. She could have well plotted the entire thing, but it does not sit right with me in how she would have lost all their valuable belongings in the fire meant to destroy the evidence, and only _then_ receive what money the side of his family owed her?”

“An arguably lesser sum. Yes, I see your reasoning.” Her frown was so deep that the elf feared it would soon sweep the floor. “So...” Whatever she was going to suggest, it had been exhaled with sharpness.

Silence only befell them briefly and was gone as quickly as it had come: Cassandra's bold laughter shattered it. Sîrma's still features gave way to a quizzical grimace, half-hidden beneath the headscarf.

“I believe we have yet to meet our killer, my Lady!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The baroness' family finds themselves with perfectly credible alibis. But she views the world through a distorted prism, thus we cannot trust her point of view, not quite. The criminal is not even here!”

Sîrma was still wide-eyed when she smiled herself. That cold anticipation of new information to sink in had disappeared. “Well, I suppose you are a Seeker for nothing not, _ai_?”

They kept going for ages. Scenes to be dissected, speculations, hopes of the sequel being translated, thrown to the winds. At some point unknown and unnoticed, they began to cut up the figs – Cassandra showed her the odd combination of the fruit with rough bread, Sîrma showed her the amount of dedication she put into scrunching up her nose. A candle was lit, its light turning slivers of the Herald’s dark fingers bronze. Time slipped, and they didn’t know when. It turned to rolling away, each in an opposite corner, ruminating over new series of codes, and reeling back in to debate the meaning. Time slipped, and as did the pages, and soon it was only a finished story and the wine glasses on either side.

Something felt different, yet too recognizable. Like this had been done before, further back, perhaps in another lifetime. The Inquisitor threw her previously crossed legs across the floor, the Seeker rolled her building energy with her cramped shoulder. This restlessness, they had gone through it before. _Halamshiral._

The road was clearer now.

“I keep remembering that dance you taught me at the Winter Palace.” This was an odd thing to bring up. Misplaced, even. Sîrma stared with surprise for the millionth time that evening. Her face was so open when nobody looked.

“What of it?”

“I never was graceful enough for dance, but you still took me.” The idle book between them was a question mark in itself.

“Do you want to see another?”

But she was already up, less dizzied by the drink than by the excitement of allowing herself to roam free on familiar ground. If her face had gone dark scanning with a motive before, it was now alight as a small sun. Honey-wine swirled at the bottom of a glass. With little more to offer than a simple lack of words, Cassandra could but observe.

It was a gradual start. The Inquisitor's coldly back-lit form shucked the distant chill from its limbs and began to dissolve into the atmosphere, still warming up to the curious instrument's strings. It rested on her shoulder, the bow harp, and she plucked at it with such gentleness it led the seated woman to believe she'd soon start cooing and rocking it in her arms. Rocking with the harmony of the low tide, twin to the slow spin of celestial bodies, and watching the tedious dance fall into place and rhythm brought a wave of quiet over Cassandra's head – _she felt the world turn_.

While Sîrma swayed like golden wheat down in the fertile lowlands, liquid, otherworldly, a new thought bloomed in the corner of Cassandra's mind and, ashamed, she ripped it from the roots a split second after it had coloured her cheeks red–

But when the song itself rose from her throat in raspy syllables woven from foreign feelings that could not be named in this pitiful common tongue, it became even more surreal, like their entire surroundings had shifted and become someplace _else_. The Seeker had not stepped foot in wretched Nevarra in years, yet this play molded its red soil and black pines from the carpet and the massive walls of the Inquisitor's quarters. She was gazing over the land which lay beyond the insufferable architecture of giant crypts and gilded parks, a land she had not cast her eye to since her days before the awkward, tall, angry girl handed to the Order.

Sîrma halted mid-verse and mid-spin. "Should I translate?" Her eyes had lit up with such bliss not only speaking, but singing Elvhen again – it was hard to say yes. So instead Cassandra remained silent, but the elf picked her lyric back up in Trade, equally mystifying.

“ _Father Mountain, I beg you not to weep to the star,_

_Its cheating speech is cruel and unbearably far;_

_Do not seek to find solace in the flame of the moons,_

_Their eyes are two daggers lending salt to your bruise._

_Babae, Babae, o, sullen mourner all alone!_

_Mother Steppe, turn to me and take notice of my tears,_

_The laurel bows down swiftly to kiss away our fears,_

_And the grapevine laces its embrace around our jaded limbs,_

_The acacia lays before us maps and poems of our dreams._

_Mamae, Mamae, o, sweet desert bird!_ ”

Sîrma weaved around the room like the world could spare her nothing and she, in return, only owed the smile which painted her face red and blue; her steps were lighter than the trade winds and voice deeper than a hidden pool in the heart of a forest. The song went on and on and _on_ , with every twirl the words arching, with every arch the words twirling and each syllable was a rust-stained leaf slowly falling in mid-autumn. Through the haziness, Cassandra found herself clutching the book at her chest while her eyes widened in wonder and yearning awe. When had she picked it up?

“ _My tired love which I have sent out rises wail upon wail,_

_And I do wonder in the waste when I'll see my sweet home's sail,_

_All I see is rock fangs biting upon this thunder's untamed roar_

_And I surge forward filled with new hope that I'll reach my people's shore._

_Vhenan, vhenan, today I shall come home!_ ”

It was an art plucked from someplace greater than fiction, this... hypnotizing dance of the elf's. She carried her harp on her shoulder and lay all for the sitting woman to see. It was over before she could finish one last slow exhale, afraid of disturbing the serenity of the moment, so ancient and ephemeral all the same.

“I would not have imagined you–“

The Inquisitor promptly shushed her, and the sound itself was more a curled chuckle than a frown of disapproval. “Join me for the next.” She extended a hand, every inch of her torso bubbling with warm expectancy, the harp suddenly lighter on her shoulder when the Seeker rose from her place without a second thought, although the fingers she offered were reluctant with shivers and looming questions which would not word themselves.

“I am certain you know this one,” she further muttered and neither doubted it. The new melody was slow to begin, every note embracing the forms of their bodies and movements, choppy at first, then languid and sure even in awkwardness.

“ _On aching branch do blossoms grow, the wind a hallowed breath..._ ”

Surprise was a moth fluttering its silken wings against a gasp, quickly giving in to the lilted background pinch of the bow harp's strings.

“ _…Carries the scent of honeysuckle, sweet as the lover's kiss_.”

Here came hesitation again, ready to pull the world from beneath the Seeker's feet and have her trip, but instead it found her steady and confident in her pace. The Inquisitor needed not wait for her to mold to the dance, even if she was not quite as graceful – it was only slow circling, barely leaning onto each other then immediately catching their breaths in the second they straightened. She bowed and Cassandra followed, trading places with such ease as if she'd known this ritual her entire life, as if it had lain peacefully dormant within. Outside, a stray note dissolved into the evening clear under the very first stars.

“ _O! brings the promise of more tomorrows, of sighs and whispered bliss!_ ”

When time halted in written stories, the pair involved would catch each other's flickering gaze and lock eyes for as long as it took disorderly thought to become crystallized speech. Cassandra naturally had expected the same; yet it wasn't the wraithlike elf's eyes she saw when brief silence lingered for a single moment, extending into hours in the same fleeting spark, but the curve of her neck and her head facing to the side, slightly tipped against the harp's painted spine, a wide smile visible in the crow's feet and audible in the lyrics' echo, feeble as much as it was daring. _And it was beautiful beyond measure_. Still, a part of her invented some fear she deemed rightful in the bowels of her skull.

 _But fear goes against ration._ And it was her turn to speak as they rounded each other with the mellow swaying reminiscent of willows and their silver bough. Their lifelines had plotted this entire event. She understood.

“ _His..._ Her _lips on mine speak words not voiced, a prayer_

 _Which travels down my spine like flames that shatter night_.”

No stutter came in neither verse nor step. This dance was not quite dance, much like this poem was not quite poetry, a stone's throw away from each other though miles apart all the same.

“ _Her eyes reflect the heaven’s stars, the Maker’s light,_ ”

– movement slowing, sloppy, though on the right track, like the millennia-long erosion of the shores –

“ _My body opens, filled and blessed, my spirit there,_

 _Not merely housed in flesh, but brought to life_.”

Upon this untimely ending, the Inquisitor plucked a discordant couple of sounds which breathed life into the atmosphere, a piece that shouldn't have fit with the previously peaceful melody, yet it did thanks to lyre-bred fingers. In a single pirouette, she crouched swiftly and put the instrument away, and rose once more with a curious flame to her gaze. Neither said anything, only stood: maybe one elbow away, scrambling for eloquence.

It was the Seeker again who broke the silence. “ _Carmenum di amatus_ ,” said her and her heart skipped one too many beats, but her voice was cool and gentle. An open palm lingered unknowing on the apex of her sternum. "I thought this one was banned."

“ _Of_ , my stars! If only I had known my options before! Was it another you were hoping for, Pentaghast?”

“Not quite.” Her eyes sought a place other than the elf's own, thunder having turned to unpolished silver instead. “May I?”

A cue oh so, so very familiar, lingering right on the edge of her lips, over the precipice between them, knowing the Inquisitor had long agreed – _perhaps even from the beginning._ What had transpired at Halamshiral had been impulsive and risky. Why do it again? Why, and after the mutual rejection?

But both already knew how it was supposed to unravel, a cautious, long graze across the Inquisitor’s cheek to pull away the veil, even though she'd wrapped it rather differently that night, in such manner that her bare neck gleamed after the dancing and singing. Except the request did not draw the expected result.

More often than not, kissing was a hungry thing. Longing and _aching_ to give and receive in return, and the fervor of it had hands trailing jawlines and bodies pushing until one's back was against the wall. Woman kissed woman on slightly agape mouth, rushing it into unexplored territory.

“You've changed... your mind about me,” groaned the Seeker in-between chipped breaths. She found the Inquisitor to be even heavier now than during sparring, and she knew what this was, testing her strength against her own like she'd do with the new men, she recalled an earlier stray thought.

“As have you.” She stopped with her nose pressed into the woman's already burning cheeks. The elf's clear voice hummed against her skull. Then it broke. “I forgot how this is done.”

It surprised her. Although she could find no explanation to this falter, so struggled Cassandra against the Herald and crushed her right back, until she _truly_ realized she found no force resisting her. The frayed remainder of the elf's kick was all hanging from a waif-thin string, the big heart in her chest beating too slowly between them. A pause – enough for Cassandra to quit her tugging at Sîrma's headscarf, enough for the latter to decide she would not raise her eyelids. Her attention lingered elsewhere. As the Seeker took to unwinding the veil, lightly, slowly, with such practiced care despite not looking, she noticed how deep the scar which split the Inquisitor's lip ran. In her mind, she also wondered whether titles were necessary anymore; _not quite, not at all_ . This, she thought, whatever scene was unfurling its learning limbs required them to be little more than their birth names. It had been rather foolish to think it would be quick. Sîrma was not a character that could be predicted. No romance like lightning. The elf had blown out like a lamp in the storm, insecurity besting her – _again and again and again_ ; Cassandra wished to help, insecure to the point of terrified herself.

“Tell me how you wish for this to carry out. Please.”

A pair of eyes, ashen, searched for Cassandra's and found them swimming in the sincerity of her plea. “I think I can bring this to the end you would want not.”

“The end I would want,” repeated Cassandra, “is the end _you_ want, if or when you want it.”

A pause, curled into an elated smile faltering with the overwhelming emotion. “Thank you.”

They carried on wordlessly after Sîrma had also helped pull the loose scarf off her head. Dance steps still. One, two, three full breaths turning ragged in the blink of an eye, knocking the wind out of the other, though not violent, and, above all, _wanting_. Faraway conversations ringed beyond the mist, yet did either care? Not at all, not in the least, not while woman strung up on a new kind of euphoria slowly guided woman onto the bed with a twirl and a loop of the arm. The indecisiveness was but hazy in how they wished neither to hurry nor to slow down. Here Sîrma paused and took the other's face in her hands with the unique wish to hold this moment close for longer, only to let her go the next heartbeat. Here Cassandra's welcome mouth catching her ear with flawless diction sent an electrifying shiver all throughout her ribcage. Here they quit speeding through and allowed everything to bleed like ink dispersed in water.

The sun dipped low in the night sky, and as did they.

The lost thought from before resurfaced anew, except this time Cassandra did not deem it as scandalous.

_Does the Inquisitor dance like she makes love?_

**Author's Note:**

> lads.....first public baby fic... i've little to no idea how to work my way round here so plz bear wtih me ;_:


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